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Why Wine Trading Still Operates Like It’s 1985

The fine wine market is booming—but the tools used to trade it are stuck in the past. Here's why outdated infrastructure is holding back collectors, producers, and the industry at large.

In a world where you can trade stocks with a swipe and buy Bitcoin in bed, the wine trade still runs on paper, faxes, and phone calls.

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Yes, seriously. Faxes.

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Despite being a $470 billion global industry, the infrastructure behind wine distribution, allocation, and secondary trading hasn’t changed much since the Reagan era. And that’s not just a curious fact, it’s a barrier holding the industry back.

Let’s break down why wine trading is stuck in the past, and what it’s costing collectors, producers, and buyers every day.

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The Fax Machine Is Still Ringing

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The first red flag: communication.

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A 2023 study found that over half of wine brands still use fax and telephone as their primary business channels. Another third rely on postal mail. While every other luxury category has migrated to real-time platforms and APIs, wine is still sending out paper order sheets and waiting for someone to scan or call back.

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This creates delays, missed allocations, duplicate errors, and logistical headaches that would never be tolerated in finance, fashion, or hospitality. It's not charming. It's inefficient.

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Blame the Three-Tier System

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After Prohibition, the U.S. implemented the three-tier system to prevent monopolies and overconsumption. It was built to slow things down. And it succeeded.

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Today, nearly every bottle of wine must travel through three mandatory checkpoints: producer, distributor, and retailer each with their own markup, manual systems, and conflicting incentives.

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For collectors, this means limited access and inflated prices. For producers, it means losing control over who drinks their wine and at what price. And for distributors, it means juggling outdated tools and fragmented records.

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Allocation Is Still Done by Hand

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Want a rare Burgundy or cult Napa release? Good luck.

Allocation, how fine wine is distributed when demand exceeds supply, is still mostly manual. Distributors track relationships and order history across multiple spreadsheets or handwritten logs.

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Bottles get “allocated” but not “taken,” and buyers who actually want the wine are often passed over because their name wasn’t on the right list.

It’s a system that wastes inventory, frustrates buyers, and puts small wineries at a disadvantage.

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Wineries Still Use Notebooks

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Walk into most wineries and you’ll see state-of-the-art tanks, beautiful barrels and paper logs.

Fermentation notes, temperature data, and tasting impressions are still scribbled in notebooks. Some wineries have upgraded to spreadsheets, but very few use cloud-based platforms or integrated systems.

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Data is hard to track, harder to share, and almost impossible to leverage for forecasting or quality control.

This analog approach isn’t artisanal. It’s fragile. And it breaks under the weight of modern distribution.

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Even “Modern” Wine Trading Is Behind

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The traditional method of wine trading via brokers and merchants is relationship-based and slow. It’s still common for trades to be negotiated over email, confirmed by phone, and fulfilled weeks later.

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While platforms like LiveTrade or Vinovest are beginning to digitize the space, they’re decades behind the sophistication of modern asset marketplaces. There’s no real-time data. No shared liquidity. No transparent order book.

That gap leaves collectors with no trusted, efficient place to trade bottles they already own—and forces many to sit on wine they’d happily move, if only the system worked better.

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The Cost of Doing Nothing

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This slow pace isn’t just inconvenient. It’s expensive.

Bottles sit unsold because of inefficient allocations.
Retailers mark up wine due to storage delays and distribution gaps.
Producers lose control and margin with every hand the wine passes through.
Collectors miss opportunities to buy or sell because there’s no live marketplace.

And younger buyers, those who expect frictionless digital experiences, don’t even bother. They skip the category entirely. In a time when Gen Z trades NFTs and sneakers from their phones, wine feels like it’s running on DOS.

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Some Signs of Life

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Change is happening,but slowly.

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Blockchain is starting to verify provenance. Some wineries are digitizing their inventory. New platforms are entering the secondary market. But adoption remains limited, especially among smaller producers who lack the capital or technical staff to make the leap.

Until these changes become systemic and universal, the market remains fractured.

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CruTrade Is Built for 2025, Not 1985

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This is where CruTrade comes in.

We don’t use fax machines. We don’t tolerate slow settlement. And we don’t let collectors guess whether a wine was stored properly or traded six times without documentation.